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More women leaving corporate trenches to set up their own companies

Many abandon thriving careers because corporate culture doesn’t meet their needs, studies show

Bridgitte Alomes with some her natural toys and furniture she has made in her environmentally friendly small business.

Photograph by: Steve Bosch
, Steve Bosch

When Bridgitte Alomes moved to Vancouver from Australia about 12 years ago, she began a thriving career developing marketing strategy software for various global corporations.

At one point, she was the youngest director and the only female on a corporate team. “That was interesting,” she said with a laugh.

“Being a decision-maker in a male-dominated industry was definitely difficult.” However, she said, it provided her with an incredible amount of learning and strengthened her as a human being, preparing her to join the growing ranks of female entrepreneurs who are leaving the corporate trenches to strike out on their own.

In 2006, she veered off in a brand new direction, co-founding Natural Pod, which designs natural play spaces, furniture and toys suitable for child-care centres, preschools, kindergartens, community centres and children’s hospices.

From a manufacturing base in Cobble Hill in the Cowichan Valley on Vancouver Island, the company’s product appears both locally and internationally, including in Vancouver at the Collingwood Neighbourhood House and Elsie Roy Elementary in Yaletown. She has also done work for the first eco-preschool in Harlem, N.Y.

Though she may not have realized it at first, Alomes is part of a growing trend.

According to a Statistics Canada report, self-employed women made up 14.5 per cent of the labour force in B.C. in 2009. That was the highest percentage in the country, followed by Alberta (13.4 per cent) and Saskatchewan (13.2 per cent).

Another Statistics Canada report shows that between 2001 and 2011, the number of self-employed women grew by 23 per cent, compared with 14-per-cent growth in male self-employment.

A survey of 500 of the top female executives by the Ipsos Reid polling firm released this week yields a few clues as to why this exodus is occurring. The vast majority of those polled believe the glass ceiling is still very much alive in corporate Canada.

And in August, Joanne Norris was hired by the Vancity credit union to lead a project that put her in touch with a large cross-section of female entrepreneurs. Through it, she gained insight into why they leave the corporate world, and what stands in their way once they do.

She found that apart from corporations’ lack of flexibility to deal with the traditional female roles of caring for children and the elderly, they often don’t reflect women’s concerns for the environment, their desire for contribution to community, their social values and their desire to create a more holistic society.

Women also often feel the corporate culture is inimical to their own, that their voices are lost or suppressed in the hollow corporate canyons.

Norris also wondered why women, who often start businesses at a rate exceeding that of men, don’t grow them as fast. One obvious reason is women often have less collateral than men, making them less attractive to banks when it comes to loans.

But she found another big factor is lack of financial literacy. Women are often more emotionally attached to the product they provide or the mission behind it than to business methodology. They often don’t recognize the need to hire employees and advisers and do the necessary legal work. They don’t always recognize where they lack expertise.

Another factor is the lack of self-confidence to make their business grow.

“It’s hard, particularly if you are geographically or socially isolated,” she said.

There are independent consultants who can help, like Melanie Rupp, who spent 17 years in the world of high finance with HSBC Canada, progressing in roles with increasing responsibility from manager to assistant vice-president.

She left in 2004, she says, because “I just was not getting enough out of all the time I was putting into my corporate career.”

First she worked for a non-profit organization and for a successful woman entrepreneur, but she found her true calling in helping other female entrepreneurs.

She knows what many are going through. While still working at the bank she had two kids at home, and was leaving for work early and coming home late while scrambling to do everything else in between. “I just didn’t get a sense that they appreciated or valued that,” she said.

“The corporation sucks you dry. They take the best out of you and they just didn’t give me enough in return.”

Rupp feels universal child care is only part of the solution for struggling female executives. She feels the corporate world is designed by men for men, and that a paradigm shift to more women-led businesses is the only way to fix the problem.

For Alomes, with the birth of her son in 2003 the germ of a business idea was also born. Holding that brand-new being in her arms made her want to do something more compelling than software marketing work for corporations. The birth of her second child three years later was the final kickstart to get Natural Pod established.

She doesn’t resent the time spent working in the trenches of corporate Canada. But “from a business standpoint, it wasn’t enough for me. It was impacting corporate change but not impacting social change or the local economy or change in children’s lives.”

She also had a different calling.

“I am definitely an entrepreneur by heart. I have an entrepreneurial spirit.”

Working in her own business better suits her natural rhythms as a mother and as a business woman, she says.

She describes herself as an extremely hard worker but “I am not a nine-to-five kind of person. When I am productive and work at my peak, that is when I work. When I need some down time, I take that down time and regenerate and get back to it.”

Like those toys her company manufactures, she feels as a female entrepreneur all parts of her are now clicking in harmony.

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